Charles Reid and Kjersti Buass Win Open Jam

Some years it’s a QP, some years a big air, but this year the call was to reinvent last year’s skatepark-inspired jam setup for the annual invitational. Last night, Ethan Deiss, Zak Hale, Yale Cousino, Danny Davis, Charles Reid, Jason Dubois, Seb Touts, Jamie Anderson, Gabi Viteri, Kjersti Buaas, and Spencer O’Brien among others were all invited to step up to 90-minute jam session in front of a hyped up crowd. The atmosphere was definitely party time. In the end Kjersti Buaas and Charles Reid claimed the top spots and $10,000 cash.

We checked in with Burton’s Global Events Director Liam Griffin about this year’s somewhat unusual setup.

Where did the idea for this Jam setup come from?

The Jam was the brainchild of Aaron Dettling from SPT. The goals for this year was to create more lines that didn’t collide with each other-trying to figure out one-way only features like the hip, the canon, the bridge, and the closeout rail. It had a way better flow than last year’s. It had a lot of the same elements, it was just arranged in a different way. The bridge really made a lot of that possible.

How do you decide what you build for the invitational event each year?

I do a lot of Opens, but I only do one invitational, and it’s fun to just work with people to come up with ideas and see where the sport is at any given moment and figure out what’s the right thing to do now. There’re a lot of sick big airs happening, we don’t need to do another one. Right now, no ones doing quarterpipes because it just kinda got too gnarly. The rail jam thing as far as the traditional ‘this is a staircase that we’re trying to replicate this thing in the city’-there’s a lot of that going on.

So, this has evolved from last year’s to a point of being able to have Jack Mitrani sort the hip all night, and Charles Reid can ride everything, and then Yale, Forrest, Deiss, the rail dudes just sessioning close out to flat and being stoked on it.